Wednesday, June 22, 2016

Then
they found the man, out of whom the devils were departed, sitting at
the feet of Jesus, clothed, and in his right mind: and they were
afraid.

This
morning's Gospel is one of the most strange accounts in all
of
the Gospels. It's also one of my favorites, because I think it offers
a striking representation
of self-destructive humanity which is delivered and renewed by
God in Christ.
After crossing the sea of Galilee, our Lord and his disciples enter
into a primarily
Gentile region—this is evident by the fact that in this county the
people keep herds of pigs which of course then and now are forbidden
food for observant Jews. In this land our Lord
and his disciples meet a man who, according to St. Luke, had
certain devils long time, and ware no clothes, neither abode in any
houses but in the tombs. In
a parallel account in the Gospel of Mark, we are told in
addition
that this man used
tocut himself
with stones.
I
cannot help but be struck how suggestive this detail is for
our own age. There
is a small but significant trend among young people—young women in
particular—to cut themselves and practice self-harming. One of the
triggers for this in this intense negativity that young people feel
about themselves and their bodies. I believe that this phenomenon is
not just isolated abnormality of human psychology but actually an
acute manifestation of the
more pervasive problem of self-loathing. Listen, you probably don't
cut yourself, you may not even loathe yourself, but I bet you know a
lot of people in the world, and maybe young people in your family who
loathe themselves. Look at the staggering number of suicides every
year
among teens and those in their
twenties. Despite Gen-Xer's and Millennials
being fed a steady diet of self-esteem reinforcement with things like
participation awards, very little of this
has seemed to translate into greater confidence and positive
self-image. The world, my friends, has defined what constitutes a
happy life—certain physical looks, popularity, academic and
professional success—and when these don't measure up, as inevitably
they don't because we're human, the living flesh and blood pales with
this
perfect
image, and self-loathing ensues. The demon-afflicted
man may seem a world apart from us, but I would suggest that he is
really a representation
of our self-loathing society and may be a portrait of us in
self-loathing or self-destructive behavior.

But
the power of the Gospel is that our Lord comes and he wants to
deliver this demon-afflicted man. There is no personal gain for our
Lord—he just pities this afflicted son of Adam and wants to see him
restored to his right mind. What
further
illustrates
the vigor of self-destruction in these demons is
that
our Lord at the
demons'
request sends them
into
a herd of swine. The demons who make the man cut himself, enter
into the swine and the herd runs
violently down a steep place into the lake and are
choked.

Life,
my friends, is a battle. It is outward battle of trials and
vexations, mostly
things
out of our control, and it is inward battle as we struggle with sin
and temptation and fight
our own inner demons of
addiction, or
self-hatred,
or
anger,
or
greed,
or
malice.
All these kill. These are
the
demons that
cause
the man to cut himself and that
move
the herd to be cast violently down and drowned. The demonic is
self-destructive, as is sin. We think sin will make us happy or at
least will not harm us, but on another cognitive level we are usually
aware of how unhappy sin makes us and how sin robs us of spiritual
joy. Clinging to that rage will kill you. Ask any doctor, and he will
tell you that the stress of anger increases blood pressure and the
rates of heart attack and stroke. Ask any Christian, and you will be
told that anger roots out joy and peace. And yet in a kind of
insanity we cling to that rage and anger. Addiction to alcohol or
pornography will do the same thing: driving one to self-destruction.
Part of the nature of sin is that it causes self-destruction. St.
Augustine makes a profound statement on this point. In explaining the
commandment to love your neighbor as yourself, he points out that
implicit
to
the commandment
is the
love of
self.
And so he asks the questions what does it mean to love yourself, and
concludes that
to love yourself is to have compassion on yourself; to
have compassion on yourself is simply not to sin because sin is that
which kills us.

Our
Lord wills to deliver those who are afflicted by inner demons. In
this miracle, the kingdom of God breaks into human existence. In the
kingdom of God, there is liberation for the captive, freedom for the
possessed, joy for those who are cast down by sorrow and despair.
Listen to this beautiful succession of actions attributed to God in
the Psalms: The
Lord upholds the
cause of the oppressed, and gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets
prisoners free, the Lord gives sight to the blind, the Lord lifts up
those who are bowed down. . . the Lord watches over the foreigner,
and sustains the fatherless and the widow.
Our Lord’s ministry is the manifestation of these works of God,
exemplified in this miracle. Our Lord reveals God’s dominion over
every spiritual evil in his kingdom. If our Lord delivers the man who
cuts himself with stones, he will deliver you too from your inner
demons and self-destructive
behavior. Your deliverance may not come overnight—the implication
is that the man has been possessed for years—but seek the Lord in
prayer of the heart, gather together in Christian fellowship, study
the Bible to hear God’s word to you—and your deliverance will
come. When
we are going through a time of intense internal struggle, it
is so easy not to look
beyond the present feelings and
circumstances,
and so
to hand ourselves over to
despair. The God whom we worship, revealed perfectly in Jesus Christ,
wants to deliver us from every demon, addiction and sin. We are his
children, he
has pity on the afflicted
sons and daughters of Adam.

Sunday, June 5, 2016

The
Lord loves the righteous, the Lord cares for the stranger; he
sustains the orphan and widow.

In
last week's Gospel, we heard the story of the centurion of great
faith, and who sought to have his servant healed by Jesus. There was
an interesting tension in that account: on the one hand, there were
the centurion's friends and sympathizers who said that the centurion
was worthy of having this healing performed even though he was not a
Jew, and on the other hand, you had the centurion himself declaring
that he was not worthy. As I pointed out in my sermon, we do good
things not so that we can present them to God as a kind of resume,
but rather, doing good that we can do, we recognize that before the
Lord we are not worthy because our good is never unalloyed with a
little bad and even the good we do pales in comparison with him who
is goodness itself. What is particularly notable about last week's
Gospel in contrast with today's is that our Lord was asked to come
and perform that healing, while in today's, where he raises the only
son of a widow from the dead, he acts without being implored. As much
as we may have a sense that we are growing in holiness and in the
life of the Spirit, the more profound truth is that at some point we
were like this dead young man. To put it into the words of that
familiar hymn, I once was lost but now am found. At some point our
Lord found you; he came unsolicited and unwanted, by his own
authority and moved by his heart of love, to awake you out of
spiritual slumber. The Lord's greatest work is almost invariably
unsolicited, and this is so because so often we don't even realize
the good things we need or can have from the Lord. Gorging ourselves
on a steady diet of stale biscuits and water, we too often miss the
fact that our Lord has spread a table before us, and by his grace has
called us to partake, all of his own initiative.

It
is interesting to put the first and Gospel lessons in conversation
with one another. Both contain stories of raising a widow's only son
from the dead. Luke wants us to think of this scene from the life of
the prophet Elijah because he understands Jesus is a prophet, but of
course, he is even greater. This is evident if read them side by
side. The broken-hearted widow reproaches the prophet Elijah for the
death of her son. The prophet takes the child into an open room, and
beings to pray, Lord,
O Lord my God, hast thou brought calamity even upon the widow with
whom I sojourn?
Then he lays upon the child three times, and finally the
soul of the child comes into him again.
It is clear that this raising from the dead is by the power of God
and not by Elijah's power. He is merely the pleader and the
intercessor, the instrument through whom the Lord works. In contrast
when our Lord sees the young man being carried on the bier, thronged
with mourners and processing towards the grave, he sees the sorrowful
mother and has pity on this poor widow. Walking over and touching the
bier, he says, young man, I say unto thee, arise. Here our Lord is
seen not as the pleader and intercessor, but as the one in whom
authority is given to raise from the dead. Like the prophets, our
Lord proclaims the truth of God, but unlike the prophets, in
him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily,
to use the words of St. Paul. Our Lord is not only the mouthpiece of
God as a prophet, but the incarnate God. He shows that he has
authority over every sickness and demon, and even over death.

But
someone might ask why didn't our Lord raise all deceased children?
Was his compassion limited just to this widow? I like what George
MacDonald, the great 19th
century Scottish divine, had to say about this passage, O
mother! mother! wast thou more favoured than other mothers? Or was it
that, for the sake of all mothers as well as thyself, thou wast made
the type of the universal mother with the dead son—the raising of
him but a foretaste of the one universal bliss of mothers with dead
sons? Now
a modern interpreter might argue that widows were often destitute in
the ancient world, so our Lord's raising of the young man had more to
do with providing for her than sympathizing with her grief, but such
a view misses the plain wording of the Scripture: when
the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her and said unto her, Weep
not.
It is a horrible, horrible thing for a parent to bury a child. Some
of you may have been through that; others perhaps have seen loved
ones and friends mourn the death of a child. A window in this church
memorializes such a death. The thought of a child cut off in the
flower of youth is horrible to contemplate—lost life and joy
swallowed by the oblivion of death. And yet our Lord comes, he has
compassion; he touches the bier. He did this not just for this widow,
but for all mothers and fathers who mourn the death a child to show
them that he is the Lord even over death and destruction. In his
kingdom, the love between a mother and a son, a parent and a child
will find its reunion and fulfillment because God is love, and that
motherly love was a gift of his. Our Lord touches our sorrows and has
compassion on the those who mourn, and we pray that, to quote the
graveside prayers from the Book of Common Prayer, he would raise
us from the death of sin unto the life of righteousness.